Big Dan Castellano: Sometimes Nice Guys Don’t Finish Last
One of the things local newspapers could do, back not so long ago when local newspapers were a community’s primary communication platform, was turn a sportswriter who covered high school wrestling into a celebrity.
That didn’t happen with every writer. It did happen with Dan Castellano, who in the 1970s covered high school wrestling, among other sports, for the Daily Record of Morris County, New Jersey.
When Dan Castellano died on Saturday in Florida, after living for many years with multiple sclerosis, he was mostly remembered in New Jersey for a later sportswriting gig, which was covering the New York Mets for the Newark Star-Ledger from 1978 to 1992 and thereby chronicling the magnetic, talented and often star-crossed Mets teams of the Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry years.
To an astonishing extent for a newspaper reporter, Castellano was considered a good guy by almost everyone, including those Mets. Players like Strawberry, Lee Mazzilli and John Franco liked him because they felt his writing was fair and he was a decent guy, not looking to glorify himself or score points with easy cheap shots. His media colleagues liked him because he didn’t carry himself like he was better than the new writers, or writers who worked for smaller papers. Everyone liked Dan.
He built the same reputation at the Daily Record, which is where I knew him. I didn’t know him as well as others did, but at a relatively small suburban newspaper, at some point you intersected with pretty much everyone.
Because almost every writer at those modest-sized suburban papers was young and not tied down, there was a lot of socializing. Castellano was a regular and popular presence at those gatherings, including the Daily Record version of a near-sacred newspaper writer ritual: meeting after work at a bar.
The Daily Record was an afternoon paper, meaning most of its content was written and edited by midnight or 1 a.m. the previous evening. As the writers finished, a good many would walk a few hundred yards down the street to Cutter’s bar, a proudly un-modernized local institution with tall wooden booths and a pressed tin ceiling.
When Castellano was in town, he was a regular at Cutter’s, helping steer the conversation through sports, movies, trivia, TV, local politics, fixing the world and good old American shop talk, like how the bosses and editors had screwed up again.
One of Castellano’s specialty categories was music, a passion underscored when someone would throw a party and he would bring along a fruitcake tin full of 45 rpm records. Having been born in Brooklyn in 1946 and thus grown up on New York radio of the late 1950s, his taste ran strongly toward early rock ’n’ roll. One night in 1974, four of us drove to New York for a Mets game and Blue Magic’s “Sideshow” came on the radio. “That,” Castellano said, “is the best new record I’ve heard since 1957.”
He did not treat listening to music as a passive experience. He sang along, and he encouraged everyone in any group to join in. His long-time colleague Bob Dixon noted that mandate among other memories in a lovely Facebook tribute he posted this week:
Nor did Castellano limit the serenading to private quarters or parties, though those were stages from which he did not shy. As the clock moved toward the 2 a.m. closing time at Cutter’s, he was known to help spark sing-alongs of his favorite vintage tunes there.
In the sports world, Castellano’s game of choice was baseball. One of the deals for sportswriters at smaller newspapers, however, was that unlike writers at large papers, they never had just one beat. They covered whatever needed to be covered. So once fall turned to winter and baseball ended, he moved indoors and covered high school wrestling.
Like other smart suburban papers, the Daily Record covered high school sports ferociously, realizing this would be a lure for everyone who had a family member in high school or who had ever attended a local high school.
Wrestling — actual wrestling, not WWE showtime — was and remains a big thing in New Jersey. Castellano covered it as seriously as he would later cover the Mets, keeping track of and writing about hundreds of kids on dozens of teams.
Besides covering matches, he wrote a wrestling column called Never Look At The Ceiling. Good title, based on a solid piece of advice in a sport where being on your back is bad. The standing proof of his standing in the local wrestling community is that sometimes he would enter a gym for a match and there would be spontaneous chants of “Big Dan!”
The bemused celebrity component of that chant aside, the really cool part is that he was being saluted mostly for the quality of his coverage. Followers of high school sports hold strong opinions about their corner of that world, so a writer has to earn their trust. Castellano convinced readers he was neither recycling hype and clichés nor ignoring cold hard truths.
Take, for one random example, a preview he wrote in late 1976 for the upcoming Dover High School wrestling team season. He had talked to the coach, Carmine Rossi, who noted that he had lost an unusually large senior class from the previous season’s 8–6 team and therefore he expected this to be a rebuilding year in which the team probably would not challenge for the Iron Conference championship.
This was the lede on Castellano’s story:
DOVER — No one can ever accuse Carmine Rossi of a lack of honesty. Realism is more his speed.
It’s not Grantland Rice. It’s not trying to be. It’s going for something else: clean and efficient.
One random wrestling preview lede hardly defines or summarizes a multi-decade writing career. It does suggest, correctly, that Castellano understood both sports and writing.
Castellano had to give up the Mets beat in 1992 when MS made it too hard for him to travel. He downshifted to writing a baseball column for the Star-Ledger until that too became too much of a challenge.
The final chapters of MS stories don’t often have an upbeat component. Castellano’s did.
As recounted by his baseball writer colleague Bill Madden from the Daily News and current Star-Ledger baseball columnist Bob Klapisch, Castellano was living in an assisted living facility in Cresskill where one of his physical therapists was a woman named Ruth Jacquez.
She told him she could provide better care than the facility. He believed her, and she did. His condition improved, they got married, they moved to Clermont, Florida, and he adopted her three children.
He was in his late 40s and early 50s then. He was 77 when he died.
Smaller newspapers have always tended to be farm systems, in a sense, for larger newspapers, and the Daily Record sent an impressive number of prospects to the top levels. Writers and editors like Don Skwar, Joe Sullivan, John Harper, Ray DeGraw, Dixon, Mark Blaudschun, Hank Gola, Barry Meisel, Sherry Ross and others moved up to papers like the Daily News, New York Post, Star-Ledger, Bergen Record and Boston Globe. Daily Record newsroom alumnus Jay Schreiber became deputy sports editor of the New York Times. Ross became a radio voice of the New Jersey Devils and the first woman to call play-by-play for a full National Hockey League game.
It’s an impressive lineup. It was made more impressive because it included Big Dan Castellano, who before he covered Lenny Dykstra and Mookie Wilson made a Randolph High School wrestling match sound as important to him as it was to the kid who was trying not to look at the ceiling.
